Floydm's blog

I just finished reading an advance copy of Eric Pallant's Sourdough Culture, which is coming out in a couple of weeks.

I had never heard this origin story for baguettes: that they came about as an attempt to cut down on knife fights in Paris by creating a loaf that met weight requirements but didn't require a knife to cut like boules and miches do.

Wikipedia lists a few other possible origins. Regardless, it makes a good story!

The Fresh Loaf is on a new server now. Hopefully you'll all find your way here and the new server performs just as well as the old one.

Nothing significant changed from a user's perspective. The server is running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS instead of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The versions of PHP, MariaDB, and some of the other tools have been upgraded accordingly.

This paves the way for a site software upgrade in the hopefully not-too-distant future, but that is a bigger undertaking.

Please let me know if you notice any problems that might be related to the move.

Heads up that an upgrade to the server TFL runs on is coming up soon. It's actually a migration to a new machine, not an in place upgrade. That's a safer approach because if anything goes wrong I can bail out and leave the site and server as they are right now.

I'm hoping to take care of it tomorrow late afternoon Pacific time but it might not happen until later in the week. I'll post another announcement an hour or so before I start.

Apologies that I have been negligent about posting or updating much here. Pandemic has meant I spend most of my day at my desk, in my apartment, working with content management systems. After 8-10 hours of that I just can't bring myself to do much more of this in the evening or on the weekend. 

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I made the Tom Cat Semolina from the last Community Bake again. 

I'm sure you've noticed that bread baking has been a popular way for people to keep themselves busy while in quarantine. Sourdough, in particular, has been incredibly popular and driven a ton of new visitors to The Fresh Loaf, many of whom have joined our community. But there has been another bread related trend that has also been driving traffic to the site: frog bread.

Like everyone else, I'm baking sourdough breads, but among the things my kids mentioned missing during the quarantine were Red Bean Buns.

I fed my starter last night, but this morning it wasn't looking as lively as I was hoping for. But I didn't want to toss my starter out, so I decided to make Sourdough English Muffins.

I've been baking sourdoughs for many years but I am admittedly imprecise and quite neglectful. It usually turns out "good enough" but rarely are my loaves great.

These ones were.

I don't share my own baking often because I tend to stick to the same formulas. Also, admittedly, the level of baking exhibited on this site now far surpasses my skills. But a couple of weeks ago I experimented with simple dinner rolls that came out really good that I want to share. It's nothing fancy or complex, but it is really good. Good enough that I made them for our Thanksgiving (Canadian) dinner and they were a big hit.